As someone with ADHD (PI) and hence quite broken executive functioning, this year I'm very proud of myself for setting a (modest) goal and then completing it. My Timasomo goal was to make embroidery kits to sell at the local (extremely small rural) craft fair

My half table with some of the kits -- each of them contains items made in japan: 100% cotton sashiko special woven thread in 10m or 22m, embroidery needle x 1 (longer ones for easier straighter patterns), momen woven cloth with pattern I pre-drew. And instructions with full colour photos of the finished products, the names of the traditional pattern if they want to look up further info or colour inspiration, and my email if they run into trouble. I also sold additional small bundles of other colours for $1 if they want to do their own design.

The goal wasn't to make money, it was meant to be an easy way for people to try a new hobby that, for me, had a high initial startup cost: all the Japanese items not easily found on Amazon had to be ordered from Japan with duties at the border. And a few things I tried to get from Amazon were fake drop ship nonsense and the quality really poor.

Anyway this was a show off piece: light grey thicker border, light blue edges, white center, and a red accent. The pattern I bought from Olympus had all the lines drawn, but someone doing one still get to decide what colour or thicknesses and how they want to join or not join intersections.

This is the traditional kasumi (mist) pattern embroidered onto an airplane tossaway cotton napkin I decided to re-use as a handkerchief. It has two different blues, red, and a very very faint white wisp that you can feel rather than see.

This is the easier package template, the traditional Asa-no-Ha Hemp Leaf pattern. So many colour and pattern variations can be highlighted in these simple geometric lines. When I have time I might make a little fabric booklet of the exact pattern done in wider or narrower stitches, in different colour combinations.

One of the major differences from Western embroidery is that in sashiko you load up a few stitches to inspect for evenness before pulling all the way through, like this (Edit: typo. And also little tips like how knots are done differently or how to do curves or how to set it all up in the beginning and how to make both sides beautiful by hiding the stitches etc. hopefully folks can jump right in and have a cozy fireside craft they can finish and be proud of)

This is the other kit option, a gradient from half of shippo-tsunagi (Seven Linked Treasures) to a full pattern in the middle with the interlocking circles, and Hana-zashi (flower stitch) with yellow added. The more traditional colouring would be two layers of circles instead of having the flowers be highlighted like this.

Anyway I got compliments and the people who bought the kits seemed excited to try!

Hi Tilderiños,

This post is long enough for a TLDR: I made this thing, it's a platform for conscious consumerism. I'm launching the beta on Tildes. It's far from complete, expect imperfect scores in many cases. Scoring is a work in progress that's part of the platform but not the sole focus. It's invite only, and on Tildes only, see my top level reply below or DM me for an invite.

To start, I'm a long time member who posts enough that at least some of you would recognize my username. I made a new account for this project because I don't want to think about being a representative on my main account.

Early on during development I decided Tildes would be the perfect place to launch a private beta because Tildoes are some of the best people on the internet in my experience. And also fairly diverse by internet standards. Aside from a handful of friends and family you'll be the first to see it.

I should give you a little backstory. A couple of years ago I lost my income. Fortunately we were in a place where we could mostly afford to live without it for a while, so I had some time to figure out what I wanted to do next. For context I have over 30 years of experience in software development. Similar for marketing, brand strategy, business development, mostly but not exclusively in the context of the internet. I'm not quite as old as that sounds, I was still a minor when I starting building things on the internet, back when almost no one really knew what the internet was or what to do with it. In short, I'm comfortably fluent in all the languages of the internet.

I've built all sorts of different types of applications and businesses, mostly commercial. This time I wanted to build something that would have a positive impact and I wanted that to be the point, rather than a side effect. I spent most of a year researching the feasibility of a number of ideas before I landed on this one.

I've been on the internet long enough to see a lot of well meaning ideas fall flat. At this point I have no idea if this is another one of those. I know the concept is solid, but that doesn't mean it will inspire people. Or more specifically in this case, be a platform people can use to inspire each other. This is complicated by my intention to be as uncynical as possible about the project. I know all sorts of tricks for capturing attention and creating hype, I know how to monetize an app and sell products. But all of that feels out of place to me if the goal in uncynical. No doubt Tilders could have a long conversation here about the balance between good intentions and practical reality. I'd have lot to contribute.

The Ethoscore Project is an attempt to make the entirely unsexy concept of conscious consumerism easy and accessible. I genuinely believe it's a viable way to make the world a little better. It includes things like company scores and community lists (including boycott lists) and accepts community contributions and corrections for every company data point including scoring. I won't make a wall of text about all the functionality and features here, you can find out more on the site.

The project is currently self funded, which will hopefully be able to last long enough to see if the idea has potential. For now, funding is a problem for later.

The roadmap is long and wide. There are so many things I want to add, at least some of which aren't terrible ideas, but at this point development has been going on for over a year and I think it's time to see what strangers think. The project's 50k lines of code took time but the larger part of development has been company research, there are currently over 15,000 brands and companies covered, which is really just a start.

You might imagine that researching the international conglomerates that own most of the brands we see would be depressing in a capitalist dystopia sort of way and you wouldn't be wrong. But there's also more good news that I expected. There are big, successful companies doing the right thing when they don't have to. More than you'd expect. And there's evidence that their practices are inspiring other companies to do the same. I don't know if it's outpacing the general capitalist race to the bottom but it's not nothing! I see reasons for optimism.

I'm hoping some of you will be kind enough to take a look. I welcome all questions, contributions and feedback. The company database and scoring are far from complete, my goal for the beta was to have enough coverage that scanning products at a big box grocery store would result in more hits than misses. I think scoring is necessary but, to me, community lists are more interesting and have more potential to be useful. At this point there are going to be a lot of bugs, imperfections and companies with scores that seem off. I want to hear about all the issues you encounter. I'm more excited about your impressions and ideas though. How does it feel to use it? Does it make sense? Is it low friction? As a user is there something important missing that you'd expect to be there? What works well? Would you do anything differently?

There aren't smartphone apps yet, I want the codebase closer to complete before I start on the joys of maintaining two more codebases and dealing with the app stores. You can install it as a PWA (web app) on your phone if you like, which mostly just makes it quicker to access. I definitely recommend using your phone if you want to play with the barcode scanner.

Throughout the beta the app will be invite only and available only to Tildes users and people I personally invite. See top level comment below for an invite.

I share some posts from my blog here, and almost all of them have a meta-discussion regarding “self-promotion”. The latest prompted me to bring up a proper meta-discussion on the subject.

Tildes' Code of Conduct says:

If you have your own site/project/channel/etc. that you'd like to share on Tildes, that's generally fine (in moderation), but it shouldn't be the primary reason that you post on the site. Tildes is a community, not a free advertising platform. Sharing your own content is welcome as long as you're involved in the community, but don't just treat Tildes as a source of an audience.

I guess we need to address what constitutes “moderation” and sharing one's own stuff as “primary reason”. Am I abusing this rule? If so, why? If not, what am I doing to avoid abusing it? (Using myself as a “control group” for the discussion; feel free to bring made up examples.)

As I said elsewhere, I like the discussions that happens here, try to engage in topics other than mine, and I share my blog posts candidly.

If anyone wants a replacement for the Tildes book club (and thanks /u/boxer_dogs_dance for running it consistently for so long!!) I run one that might interest speculative fiction readers. Be warned that it's a "dictatorship" where I pick every book, and I alternate between lesser-known books I've read and already enjoyed; and books that I'm interested in but haven't read yet.

Here is the list of books we have read:

• The Raven Scholar
• A Song of Legends Lost
• A Shadow in Summer (Long Price Quartet)
• Allow Me To Introduce Myself [the only non-spec-fic we've done thus far]
• Gods of the Wyrdwood (Forsaken Series)
• Kalyna the Soothsayer
• The Black Company (The Black Company)
• Battle of the Linguist Mages
• The Cloud Roads (Raksura)
• Sanctuary Duet
• Ten Thousand Doors of January
• The Dream Hotel
• The Element of Fire (Ile-Rien) [this is the only one so far that I hadn't read yet and didn't really enjoy]
• A Portrait in Shadow
• House of Suns [current month]
• City of Lies by Sam Hawke [next month]

The book club is in an "anyone can invite anyone but it's not publicly listed anywhere" Discord server dedicated to reading speculative fiction with about 1000 members, ~50 active), if anyone thinks like this list of books seems in line with your tastes I can dm you a join link! It's very low commitment and done with threads so you can read the current book or a backlist book and still talk about it + scroll through past discussion easily.

I can also offer advice (how to pick books, how to do things in Discord in a sane way, etc) if anyone else is interested in running something like this

Hello!

First, some context- I have a very particular way I keep track of my work and take notes throughout my work week. This is currently managed through an ever-growing list of Notion pages. And Notion is great! It does a ton of stuff really well, but it's also suffered from a lot of feature bloat over the years and has just enough oddities to irk me on the daily.

So, I built a thing. I call it True To-do because it's fun to say and I'm okay at software and less okay at marketing. It is an opinionated daily work tracker with a lot of little features:

• You can set a standard template that gets auto-copied to certain days of the week
• Supports infinite nesting and expanding/collapsing of those nested items
• Unfinished work the from the previous day can be auto-copied to new days
• It has various tools like a data roll-up and data controls
• It supports loading itself as an offline desktop app (PWA)
• Has many configurable settings for making the interface go from full to minimal
• Dark theme!

It is also 100% free, has no tracking, no cookies, no ads, doesn't ask for your email, your data does not leave your device, and is pretty performant (better than Notion, at least). It was written heavily with AI, but not by AI - It was directed, reviewed, and corrected by me.

What it does not have is any kind of user account feature. Everything stays on the device and will not transfer between devices unless you manually export and import the data. Maybe I'll add support for that at some point, I'm not sure. It is also only okay on mobile/tablet- this app was really made for desktop.

Anyways, give it a play around. It was purpose built by me for me but love to share the things I make when I think others may get some use out of them as well. I welcome feedback / bug reports / suggestions / etc.

EDIT: Stale link removed, DM me if interested and want the new link!

It's been annoying me lately how often I see people declare that certain blog posts or articles are AI-generated due to the presence of certain "tell-tale signs," (emdashes being the #1 example). It annoys me even if I agree that the thing in question is probably is AI-generated—mainly because I really like emdashes and I use them in my own writing all the time, and it grinds my gears knowing that some percentage of the population will assume I used AI because "hurr durr emdash == AI."

I'm not necessarily talking about Tildes. I'm sure I've seen it on here, but the worst offender by far is Hacker News where often one of the top comments on a linked article that has an emdash somewhere in the body will be a snarky comment about how it's clearly AI generated.

Anyway, I blew off some steam this weekend by making this silly satirical website/art project called GENIUS AI Detector that makes me giggle, so I'm sharing it in the hopes that it brings a bit of joy to any fellow emdash users who are likewise depressed about the shadow that has been cast over one of my favorite punctuation marks.

Art is an escape, an outlet for creativity. I tend to also view it becoming a burden as barriers to creation arise. Even moreso should the business and networking aspects of it be involved, however necessary an evil it may be.

I'm curious what the process is to enter your artwork into a local gallery or museum. Do you mingle during art gallery events? Perhaps you encountered a formal application, wait-list, maybe an interview?

For context, I wanted to submit a 15 minute surreal Dadaist recorded performance about modern technology and the current climate of refusing to engage in active listening.

Hey everyone!

I know there are some people on Tildes who like making games as a hobby. I’ve had a long-standing passion for game development, but I never managed to finish a project. About a month ago, I decided to push myself to finish a small game and publish it somewhere, and finally that day has come! Orb Sweeper, a 3D minesweeper puzzle on a sphere, is now live on the Google Play Store. Just as a disclaimer: it’s free, has no ads, and works offline by default, so I’m not earning anything from it. I just genuinely wanted to share my first finished project, along with the joy and relief I feel now.

Honestly, I’ve always been more ambitious when it comes to game mechanics. I’m a big fan of strategy games, especially TBS games over the years, so of course I always dreamed of creating a grand 4X strategy game of my own. Over time, I implemented many different systems and mechanics that are complex on their own: generation of realistic and interesting maps, pathfinding, economic models, different variations of game AI, and so on. But since these kinds of projects are huge, I was never able to finish one as a solo developer, or even bring it to a properly playable state. I burned out relatively quickly.

Over time, I realized what motivates me to continue: when somebody else is also working on the project, and when you can quickly see the results of your work. Both things are difficult to achieve. First, it’s hard to find people who are ready to spend a lot of their free time developing a big strategy game while following the same vision. Since it’s a hobby and I cannot pay for development, I also have to spend a lot of energy motivating others, not just myself. The longest I managed to keep a small team of two enthusiasts together was one month.

Second, with complex games like strategies, there are only a few big and impactful mechanics that bring the game to the state of a playable prototype, but getting there demands a ton of polishing. Graphics, sounds, small animations, 3D models… a lot of work that is almost invisible on its own, but contributes enormously to the overall look and feel of the game. Sometimes I feel like I’m drowning in these small fixes, and that also leads to burnout.

So I decided to make my projects progressively smaller until I could realistically complete one from start to finish. It’s a bit sad to see that only a Minesweeper-like game survived this approach, but I feel like it’s an important starting point. Seeing my game actually published gives me a bit more motivation to finish other projects.

But then… it’s Google. All interactions with its platform make me feel a bit frustrated. It’s surprisingly difficult to publish such a simple game. I even had to hire paid testers just to satisfy their entry requirements for closed-test user engagement. There are so many policies regulating data handling that even if your game does nothing in terms of transferring data, handling accounts, or showing in-game ads, you still have to go through all these bureaucratic procedures anyway. I guess it’s probably the same with Apple, but their famous support still hasn’t helped me with account verification after a month, so I’ve yet to experience that side of things fully.

Anyway, I’m glad that the game is available somewhere at least. And I actually play it myself sometimes on my phone. I know some people here are going through similar obstacles, so I have a question for you: what motivates you to continue working on big, complex games? And more generally, how do you avoid burning out on long-term projects?

The last couple of weeks I've been fooling around with different ideas for how to build a chess bot that's fun for beginners to play against. I don't have much real experience with chess, so I've mostly just been testing it against myself.

After looking into the different techniques that are used to force engines to play at a certain level, I put together my own (somewhat silly) approach and have had some fun playing against it. The problem is, as I don't really know what I'm doing when it comes to the actual game, I can't be a particularly good judge of how others will feel playing with it.

Regardless of your own skill level, I'd be super appreciative if anyone would give it a try and let me know what they think.

I'm working on a full write up of how it works, but here's the short version:

Random question. What do the wonderful people of Tildes think about self promotion here? My wife is an indie author. As a proud and supportive husband, if I posted about her new book here is that fine or in poor taste? I searched but nothing came up, which made me assume I just wasn't searching correctly. But maybe no one has asked before?

So I would love to know/hear everyone's opinions.

Hello tilderinos,

I'd like to launch my tab manager soon and to ensure a smooth launch, I'm looking for early users who would be willing to try my app as part of the private beta.

For those who would actually need this product, I'm happy to offer one year free (or more!), but even if you don't need it, I'd really appreciate the help.

I don't really need anything fancy, I'd just like to have some people install the app and try it to know if it works properly for them or if any unexpected issues come up, especially major ones. I'd like to make sure that the actual launch will be smooth, especially considering that I've been working on this project for four years now. It'd be a shame if it all went to waste.

Thanks a lot in advance!

PS - I wasn't sure in which group to post